


Heart to Heart to Heart

by Indian_Ink



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Hugs, Late Night Conversations, Post-Episode: e041-049 The Eleventh Hour Parts 1-9, Pre-Episode: e051-057 The Suffering Game Parts 1-7, Sleepovers, Team as Family, Tres Horny Boys are good bros, making up properties of soulwood, several attempts at humour are made
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-18
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2019-01-19 04:40:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12403287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Indian_Ink/pseuds/Indian_Ink
Summary: Haunted by what he learned in Refuge, Magnus has trouble sleeping.Merle chugs one. Taako makes a potty run. Magnus hugs it out.





	Heart to Heart to Heart

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote this... uhhh 5-6 months ago, back around the time Reunion Tour part 2 came out, and I finally listened to the finale last night. I wasn't sure I was ever going to post this, but I think some of the lines I wrote in here ended up being echoed in the finale in some ways, so I feel obligated to now, haha.
> 
> I feel like this is one of the weirdest things I've written, not content-wise but tonally, because I tried to imagine this as an episode of the podcast, and well. Tres Horny Boys tend to joke in the middle of serious scenes. Mood Whiplash, ahoy?
> 
> Also, I haven't proofread this at all because I'm scared if I do I'll lose my nerve and never post it so sorry if it's super bad sljflsf
> 
> EDIT: I was checking around the fanfic recs section of TVTropes and this? Humble little oneshot is there on The Adventure Zone page??? I... that's pretty crazy y'all!! I am very tired (that's what reading fanfics at 3am gets you) but also very honoured. Thank you mysterious tvtropes user spidgey, you have made this little writer very happy :'D

It was all so _stupid_.

He was Magnus Burnsides. He loved Julia Burnsides more than anything in the world, he was Steven Waxman’s son-in-law, the Hammer to his Tongs. Raven’s Roost, abandoned and desolate as it was, was his home. He was good with his hands and good with animals and wanted to do nothing more than do _good_. He knew who he was.

Except for all that static he had seen in his own past. Except for the plans of Refuge’s central statue. Except for the fact that he was, or would one day become, a Red Robe.

The Red Robes had created the Relics, tried to poison him and Taako and Merle, killed Captain Bane in cold blood. Because of them, Gundren, Hurley, and Sloane and hundreds of others were dead. The vision of Phandalin being consumed by flames achingly slow crawled across his mind like a slug too often these days. The Director was hiding something, but the fact that the Red Robes were evil didn't seem to be it. He had all the evidence he needed to come to that conclusion for himself.

How had it happened? How was it _going_ to happen? Why hadn't Istus warned him? Had she not known? What if - and this was the question that gnawed at his insides, kept him tossing and turning at night above all the others - what if one day he hurt Taako or Merle? What if he... _enjoyed_ hurting them?

The tears rose up again like a river flooding with rainwater. He _hated_ this. This not knowing, this helplessness, this fear that ate at him. It drove him out of his bed night after night, to sit alone in the shared common room, shaking and sobbing, and he _hated_ it.

A door opened behind him, and Magnus jumped, quick to wipe at his eyes though his shoulders still shook. With a glance over the back of the couch into the rest of the apartment, he saw Merle shutting the door to his bedroom, his snowy white beard and hair almost shining in the darkness.

“Hey Merle," Magnus said, trying and failing to dispel the tightness in his throat. He cleared his throat and tried again. “What’re you doing up?”

The dwarf watched him for a moment, eyes narrowing slightly behind his glasses, and Magnus worried that he could see the tears in his eyes even from a distance. But eventually Merle shrugged and said, “Could ask you the same thing,” shuffling into the kitchen.

Magnus watched as light flooded into the kitchen from the icebox, though it wasn’t like any icebox he had ever seen. Knowing what he knew now about Lucas Miller, he assumed that the huge upright thing made of steel was something the inventor had stolen from visions seen in that emerald compact of his. Merle poured himself a glass of water, then the kitchen lit up again as he put the pitcher back.

“Do you wear that to bed?” Magnus asked, nodding at the soulwood arm that Merle used to carry the water with him as he made his way over to sit on the other end of the couch.

“Nah, it needs some time in soil during the night or it gets all... grumpy,” Merle replied, switching the glass to his other hand so he could flex the wooden fingers of his right. “But I haven't really been asleep. Been up reading.”

“Oh.” The hope that maybe Merle hadn't heard him crying took a heavy blow, but as Merle took a sip of water, Magnus felt himself smile slightly for what was maybe the first time in hours. “Chug, chug, chug…”

“What?” Merle glanced up at him, the glass still to his lips. “Magnus, it's just-”

“Chug, chug, chug!” Magnus chanted, the smile turning into a grin.

Merle rolled his eyes but there was a definite upward twitch to his mustache, and he lifted the glass up to gulp down the contents. There was still an aching emptiness in his chest, but Magnus laughed and applauded. “Thank you, thank you,” Merle said, bowing to an imaginary crowd. “I’ll be here ‘till Tuesday.”

Silence and something like anticipation settled over them, and suddenly Magnus knew, he _knew_ , that Merle was about to ask some uncomfortable questions. He wanted to sprint to the kitchen, pour out a dozen glasses of water, and challenge Merle to a drinking contest - first one who has to pee loses - anything to keep those questions away, but Merle cleared his throat and put the glass down on the coffee table.

“Listen, Magnus,” Merle said, voice even rougher than usual. “I’ve heard you out here the past few nights. Crying.”

“Uh... I, uh, don’t know what you're…” The feeble lie trailed off as Magnus caught sight of Merle’s stern frown. Magnus added embarrassment and shame to the top of the pile of stupid, frustrating emotions he was feeling and sighed. 

“I don’t-” He paused. ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ wasn’t the right thing to say, because Pan, Istus, whatever deity damn it, he _desperately_ wanted to talk about it. But his mind turned to static whenever he tried to think too hard about the statue, and the only thing he knew for sure was that Merle had as many reasons to trust a Red Robe as he did. Zero. Zilch. 

“I don’t think... I should tell you.”

Merle thought this over, stroking his beard. “Is it about what the Chalice showed you?” he asked eventually. “I know you didn’t want to talk about that back in Refuge, but we could now.”

“...No, it's not that.” But that wasn't true either, because the thought of getting Julia back ate at him too. “Not exactly,” he amended.

Magnus sat in silence for a moment, thinking how to put his fears into words. Merle waited patiently beside him.

“Remember Camp Goodfriend?” Magnus finally said. “When that ceiling was coming down on us, and I thought we were all gonna die, I said that-”

“You were glad you got a new family,” Merle finished, softly. “I remember.”

“And I’m just-” Fuck, here came the tears again. “I’m _scared as shit_ that one day I’ll hurt you, or Taako, and I won’t be able to stop it!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second!” Merle raised his hands in surrender as he leaned back against the cushions, taken aback. “What’re you talking about, hurting us?”

The face of that stupid statue flashed through Magnus’s head again, his own face on top of that stupid red robe. If he told Merle now, what would happen? Would he run as far and as fast as his legs could carry him? Would he tell the Director? What would _she_ do to him? 

Magnus bit at the inside of his cheek, censoring himself for once in his life. “What if- what if one of the Relics gets to me? The Chalice almost did.” Yes, that was a lie he could roll with. It wasn’t completely false, anyway. “What if I get... I don't know, hypnotized and forced to attack you guys?”

Merle stared at him, the confusion and shock not fading from his eyes. The three of them had encountered five Grand Relics together, and sure, the Chalice had succeeded in tempting all of them. Taako had nearly put on the Gaia Sash, but they had slapped (well, punched) some sense into him. Where was this fear, this very _potent_ fear and self-doubt, coming from?

“Magnus, I _know_ you. Taako knows you. I can’t speak for him, but I bet you if we asked him tomorrow morning that if anything like that happened, he’d say he’d do anything to get you back. I know _I_ would. You’d do the same for us, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, of _course_ ,” Magnus replied, and without a thought, his hand went over his heart.

“Then why’re you _worrying_ about this all of a sudden?” Merle asked, and instantly wished he could snatch his words out of the air and stuff them back down his throat, because Magnus’s face crumbled and sank into his hands.

It was the look he would see on Mavis’s face when he went to check on her after a fight. She would always insist on rolling up his sleeves to check for bruises, looking him straight in the eye, as though waiting for them to blacken, even if she knew her mother had never raised a hand to _him_. Trinkets and vases and glasses and other things, yes, but not him. Eventually he had started keeping all the treasures Mavis and Mookie brought him in a box in the back of the linen closet instead of displaying them on the shelves. 

But he supposed, for Mavis, and for Magnus now, there was always that lingering, gnawing possibility. There’s a first time for everything, people would say.

“Oh, Mag,” he said, putting his hand up on the other’s shoulders. “I get it. It’s more complicated than that, isn’t it?”

They fell into silence, unsure of what to say. A clock ticked on the wall and Magnus eventually lifted his head to stare out the wide windows across from the couch, exhausted but still wide awake. Moonlight danced over the waters and scattered isles of the Sea of Fallen Stars far below them.

“Hey, remember Battlefest?” Merle asked suddenly.

“Uh, yeah. What about it?”

“After you told us your wrestling name was gonna be I’Morko, I said something like, ‘hey, don’t forget to put your dork mask on over your bear mask!’ And you said-”

“I accidentally called you ‘dad’. Yeah, I know,” Magnus groaned. He had hoped Merle had forgotten about it, or at least would just never bring it up again. He wasn’t really in the mood to be teased about it.

But when Magnus looked over at him, Merle was plucking at the ends of his mustache, trying in vain to hide a soft smile behind a hand. He cleared his throat. “Listen, Mag, I’m not exactly… a great family dwarf. I’m not like Boyland. If I die out on a mission, I’m not gonna have hundreds of spouses and kids trying to remember me when my life gets fed to the Voidfish.

“But I guess over the course of everything, I’ve started to see you and Taako as…” he chuckled, “as my two, _weird_ , grown-up sons who I get to go on adventures with.” This time, Merle didn’t bother to hide the smile on his face as he stared out the window. “You calling me ‘dad’, even though it was an accident sorta made me realize it.”

 _Son_ wasn’t a word Magnus had heard in years. He watched Merle’s face as he smiled, and saw crow’s feet crinkle around his eyes, the same way they would around Steven’s. The faded scar wasn’t there, but the painful warmth that stole into his heart was the same.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t know why you’re suddenly worried about crossing over to the dark side, and I could just use Zone of Truth on you to find out-”

“Please don’t.”

“And I won’t, because it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re not alone in feeling like you found family,” Merle continued. “And I know I’m not the best healer, and I forget which spells clerics can do sometimes, and I use the wrong dice all the time, but I would-” He paused and Magnus saw something flicker over his face, something like immense fear and relief at the same time. But then it was gone, and Merle was smiling again. “I’d throw myself in front of a… runaway fruit cart if it meant keeping my own safe.”

Magnus felt tears prick at his eyes again, and the warmth in his heart spread until it didn’t hurt anymore. He reached over and wrapped his arms tightly around Merle, who started slightly in surprise for only a second before hugging back, his soulwood arm scuffing gently across Magnus’s cheek. “Thanks Merle,” he whispered.

“Hey,” Merle said, and gave him a hearty slap on the back before tightening his grip and rocking slightly. It was so familiar, that between it and the comforting scent of wood Merle constantly had about him, Magnus almost felt as if they were sitting in the Hammer and Tongs. “Any time.”

A moment later, Merle sniffed loudly and let go, taking his glasses off so he could scrub at his shining eyes. “Pan damnit, Mag, now you got _me_ going.”

“Heh, sorry,” Magnus replied, reaching over for the box of tissues that rested on the coffee table and offering it to Merle. “Didn’t mean to.”

Merle tore several from the box and shoved his face into them, blowing wetly. “Gross,” Magnus whispered fondly, and Merle laughed.

The peculiar, but by now familiar itch of his soulwood arm reacting on its own drew Merle’s attention. He watched several small red, orange, and yellow flowers bloom up around his forearm like a floral streak of fire.

“Whoa,” Magnus breathed.

“Oh yeah, I guess you haven’t really seen it do that before.”

“Does it… normally do that?” Magnus asked. Between the end of their adventure in the lab and Merle heading off on that recovery retreat with the Director, Magnus had ended up apologizing so much that Merle started to get testy whenever Magnus approached. It was better for them both that he had stopped, but now he felt a slight twinge of guilt that he had never asked about how the new arm was going.

“Well, sometimes it sprouts these little pink flowers when I’m… relaxed? Nah, that’s not quite it. Maybe ‘at peace’ is a better way of putting it,” Merle said, turning his arm this way and that to examine the flowers. “But these are something else. Like, I’ve seen these out in nature before.”

“So they’re not… uh, soulwood flowers?”

“Nope.” Merle stroked his other hand through his beard. “But remember when we were fighting Legion? I called out for Pan and there were those gold leaves. Maybe this is some kind of message-”

The front door opened and they both tensed, reaching for weapons that weren’t there, until they heard the whistling.

Taako was standing in the doorway, tossing his keys on the front table and hanging his hat, bag, and Umbra staff on the coat rack, whistling a cheerful tune. The very strong feeling of being watched warned him to glance up, meeting his roommates’ eyes. He hung on the last whistling note for far too long, letting it peter out pathetically.

But he recovered quickly, smiling lazily at them both. “So! Late night team meeting, huh?” He ran over, and Merle scuddled backwards with a yelp as the wizard vaulted over the back of the couch and landed with a bounce on the centre cushion. He put a sculpted clay bowl down on the coffee table and slung an arm around his compatriots, pulling them in against him. “Sorry I’m late, what’d I miss?”

“I… feel like we should be asking you the same question,” Magnus replied, looking over what Taako was wearing. The wizard always dressed with panache, but tonight he looked downright _fancy_ , with dark pants and a silk tunic patterned with stars.

“Yeah, what the hell were you doing out there?” Merle asked, raising his voice and brushing Taako’s arm off. “We both thought you were asleep!”

“Oh, you know, just out making a late night pottery run.” He shrugged languidly and waved towards the plain clay bowl before them. “Felt like we could all use a new centrepiece.”

“At one in the morning,” Merle added, giving the pottery a suspicious look.

“Sure, sure! You never know when you might need it.” Taako ruffled the snowy white hair on top of Merle’s head, who immediately batted him off with a grumble, sending one of the tissues in his lap fluttering away. 

They watched silently as Merle scrambled to throw the rest away in a nearby garbage bin. Magnus saw Taako glance over Merle’s face, then look at him out of the corner of his eye. _Shit_ , he thought, because Taako was smart, and he could put the pieces together. Red, puffy eyes on them both and an abundance of tissues meant something had gone on, some big conversation he had missed, and that meant more uncomfortable questions - right?

But Taako just raised a fist to his mouth and cleared his throat. “So, uh…”

If he was giving them a chance to deflect the topic, Magnus was taking it. He couldn’t risk the possibility of him cracking and telling them both what he had learned from June, not now. “When exactly did you head out on this late night pottery break- this,” he heard his voice start to squeak with contained laughter, “this potty break?”

Merle slapped his knee, joining Magnus in laughter. “Har har,” Taako deadpanned, though a smile twisted his lips upward. “I don’t know, maybe a couple of hours ago?”

But then he straightened his back, taking on a serious, far-off look. “There I was, lying in bed, and I thought to myself, ‘hey, we could really use something on that coffee table, like a candle holder or one of those big salt lamps’, y’know?” He slammed a fist into his other hand’s open palm. “And I _knew_ what had to be done.”

“Huh,” Magnus said, scratching at the thick hair along his jaw.

“What, ‘huh’? Do you not believe me?”

“No,” Merle answered for him.

“Oh, gee, thanks guys.” Taako crossed his arms over his chest and pouted. “Glad to see we all trust each other.”

“It’s not that we don’t trust you, Taako, it’s just that… I’ve been out here for the last couple hours and I never saw you leave.”

“Well, maybe you aren’t as great a rogue as you think you are,” Taako said, his lazy grin returning. “Maybe I’m the one who should be taking sneaking lessons from Carey.”

“Where’d you get this, anyway?” Merle asked, picking up the bowl and peering at it closely through his glasses. “It doesn’t look like anything from Fantasy Costco’s home section.”

“What, do you have the catalogue memorized?” Magnus asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I wouldn’t say _that_ , but I _do_ go there all the time!” Merle retorted. “Where do you think I get all those scented candles?”

“That’s true,” Magnus admitted.

“It does smell like heaven in there,” Taako noted.

“I’m starting to run out of shelf space in there,” Merle mumbled to himself, stroking his beard. Then he snapped his fingers, remembering. “Oh! Did you go the Chug and Squeeze?”

Taako, who had been doing a very admirable job of looking completely unflappable, looked at him with a start.

“Wait, what is that?” Magnus asked, glancing over Taako’s head to Merle. “I think Carey mentioned it earlier today.”

“The new place that lets you make pottery while you wait for dinner.”

“Ohhh, yeah!” He glanced down at Taako, then grasped his arm by the bracer and lifted it up to Merle, grinning. “Oh man, he totally did! He has clay under his fingernails!”

Taako wrenched his arm out of Magnus’s grip with a fierce glare while Merle frowned deeply. “Aww, you went without us?” he asked.

“I- uh. So what if I did?” Taako said, folding his arms over his chest again, though this time he tucked his hands into his armpits, as though that would hide the evidence Magnus had already spotted. “Sometimes you have to _treat yo self_ , my dudes. Go out to a fancy dinner by yourself once in a while, you know what I’m saying?”

“See, normally I’d buy that, but the whole reason Carey mentioned it is she wanted help picking out an outfit for _date night_ with Killian,” Magnus said, his grin widening. “She said the place they were going was having a couples’ night special.”

No one spoke. Even in the washed-out light from the moon, Magnus could see Taako was starting to blush.

“Ooooooo hoo hoo hoo!” Merle was kicking his feet and clutching his face in glee. “You went on a _date!_ ”

“Is it someone we know? Wait, stupid question, it has to be, or they wouldn’t be on the Moon Base,” Magnus thought aloud. “Did it go well? I assume it went well - you were whistling when you came in-”

“Are they _cuuuuute_?” Merle laced his fingers together and batted his eyelashes.

“ _It’s none of your business!_ ” Taako snapped, shoving them both out of his personal space and storming forward towards the windows, taking the shortest route by stepping up and over the coffee table.

“Sorry, Taako,” Merle said in a small voice. He had had to snatch the sculpted bowl out from underneath Taako’s feet so it didn’t shatter across the table, and now he stared at it quietly, turning it in his hands. He hadn’t had to worry about things breaking in this apartment, or angry voices, or regrets. “Shouldn’t have pushed you like that.”

“Yeah, that… wasn’t cool of us,” Magnus admitted, rubbing at the back of his neck. The floor was suddenly the most appropriate place to look. “Sorry.”

Magnus watched Taako’s shadow heave its shoulders with a heavy sigh. “S’not a huge deal,” he said. “It’s still absolutely none of your beeswax, but yes, a date happened. I’m just trying to make the most of this place while it lasts, okay?”

“What do you mean, ‘while it lasts’?” Merle asked. “It’s not like this is Lucas’s lab - it’s not gonna fall out of the sky.”

“Not like _that_ ,” Taako said, glancing back over his shoulder. “I mean _this job_ isn’t going to last forever. We’ve already found Glovey, the fancy-pants monocle, the Stone, the Chalice…” He counted the Relics off on his fingers and paused, finding only four.

“The Sash?” Magnus supplied.

“Right, the Sash. And didn’t the Director say they had already found one Relic when we got here? I honestly don’t know, I haven’t listened to that episode in a while.

“Either way, we have two more Relics to find _at the most_. After that, we’re done. Finished.” Taako started tracing meandering dotted lines across the windowpane with a finger as he spoke. “We go back to being three strangers wandering around looking for jobs on Craig’s list.”

They watched him until he finished drawing out his invisible wandering over the landscape down below, thinking the truth of it over. Their quest was going to _end_ , and it was going to end _soon_ , and then what?

“‘Strangers’?” Merle said into the silence.

“Yeah, why would we split up?” Magnus asked, honestly confused.

Taako turned from the window to look them over the same way he would before declaring he was good with hanging back or staying outside. It was a look of analytic caution, like he was trying to determine whether or not there was some kind of trap waiting to spring on him.

“Taako… this is what Magnus and I were talking about before you came in,” Merle said in a steady reassuring voice he usually reserved for Mavis and Mookie after a storm, both the outside and the inside-the-house kinds. “The three of us are _family_ now. Or- at least, that’s how we see it.”

Magnus watched as Taako’s body language shifted into something that had an eerie similarity to that dog from his childhood memory the Chalice had shown him only a few days ago. The wizard was curling his shoulders inward to make himself smaller, avoiding eye contact, and shuffling backwards on the giant rug that covered up the glass floor and its stomach-dropping view. He looked like a cornered animal.

“Did… What did you think we were going to do?” Magnus asked, horrified to watch this change in his demeanour. “Did you think we were just going to cut you out of our lives? Don’t you think we’re your friends?”

“No!” Taako snapped, too quickly, and all of them winced. “No, that’s not what I meant- I mean-”

His fists clenched by his sides so tightly that they shook. He tried to glare them both down, into leaving him _alone_ , but they looked back with faces so full of hurt and confusion and worry that he couldn’t bear to look at them for more than a few seconds. He forced himself to take a deep breath in and let it go slowly, the way he would when he was just a kid trying to teach himself magic.

“I didn’t want to get my hopes up,” he admitted, answering all of their questions with one answer.

The air thickened uncomfortably, as though all the words Magnus and Merle could have or wanted to say had suddenly taken flight to flutter out of their reach. Anything they could think of was hollow and meaningless next to the idea that through everything, a part of Taako had been constantly bracing himself for abandonment.

“Well, good talk, team!” Taako said in a strained voice, clapping his hands together and starting to make a hasty retreat to his room. He made sure to keep his face turned away from them. “I’llseeyouinthemorninggoodnight-”

Magnus sprang to his feet without thinking. “Taako, wait-”

“ _Why?_ ” Taako’s voice finally rose to an angry, desperate shout, as he spun around to face them once more. Beside him, still sitting on the couch, Merle winced and raised his soulwood arm as though he was shielding himself for a hit. 

Magnus felt his heart break for both of them.

“What do you want me to _say?_ ” Taako demanded.

This was so stupid. It was _all_ so stupid.

Magnus did the only thing he could think to do.

He stepped forward and engulfed Taako in a hug, crushing him to his chest and closing his eyes.

“C’mere, you dummies,” he heard Merle say beside them, and there was the slight sound of pottery being put down and the couch squeaked and he felt wood brush against his arm as it looped around Taako’s back. Magnus adjusted, letting go of Taako only long enough to bring Merle into his grip, and rested his head on someone’s shoulder.

Hugging wasn’t something that usually happened to Taako. His most recent one had been from Ren in Refuge, and he had even managed to return it awkwardly. Lieutenant Hurley had given him one before that, and he had been too confused, too surprised to return the gesture. Then, well… they lost her.

(To poison. Goddamn _fucking_ poison.)

And here, with Magnus and Merle, with the two people he had seen and spoken to every day for more than a year, his first instinct was to shove them off, or wriggle out of their grip. But the hug was lingering on, Magnus’s head down on his shoulder and Merle’s soulwood arm wrinkling the silk of his tunic, and what his mind had first registered as cramped and uncomfortable shifted gradually. He was as warm as though a blanket had been draped over him, and he found when he leaned against Magnus, he was solid, and there was a gentle floral scent from Merle that he couldn’t place, something that he had never experienced before. Something he couldn’t have made up. Something real.

Neither of them were letting go of him anytime soon.

And that thought, the thought that they _weren’t going to let him go off into the world alone again_ echoed loudly in his head. He wasn’t going to be alone anymore, and Taako threw his arms around them both, shaking like a leaf, and somehow they managed to squeeze back even tighter than they had been already.

None of them were sure how long they stood there, but when Taako stood back slightly, it had been long enough that pulling away just felt _wrong_ to all of them. “Okay, okay,” he said in a thick voice, giving up the arm he had flung around Merle to drag it across both his eyes. He thought he had cried himself dry after Glamour Springs, but was surprised and grateful to find he was wrong. “Listen. Listen, listen, _listen_. Listen.”

“Taako. We’re listening,” Magnus confirmed.

“Just give me a second, okay? I have an idea,” he said, his voice cracking as he slowly untangled himself from what was probably one of the greatest things to happen to him. He retreated into his room, but left the door open slightly, so they could hear him rummaging around.

After a bit of swearing and a loud bump, Taako emerged in his sleeping clothes and with his old repaired wand in hand. With a wave of his hand, a ball of soft yellow light formed in the air before him. It hovered there for a few seconds, then shivered and split into a flock of smaller firefly-sized balls. Most of them shot off in different directions across the common room, while some flew back through Taako’s door.

Magnus and Merle watched, stunned, as the spell-fireflies fluttered about, picking up every available cushion and pillow in the room and depositing them in a pile at the foot of the couch. The few that had gone back into Taako’s room came back with their bounty of blankets and pillows and did the same. Then the little glowing cloud split in two, and with a mighty push, succeeded in shoving the couch and the coffee table away from one another. Merle stumbled back off the arm with a small shout. The new vase wobbled, but eventually steadied.

With a final flick of his wrist, the duvet off Taako’s bed flew out of his room and settled over him like a hooded robe. “We’re having a fucking slumber party,” he declared.

“YES. _Fuck_ yes.” Magnus was grinning as widely as a kid at a Candlenights festival. “Hold on, I’ll go get my stuff,” he said, and took off into his own room.

“I’m only gonna go along with this if we have s’mores.” Merle crossed his arms across his chest, but he was already heading into his room. “We _always_ had s’mores when we had sleepovers on the beach.”

“You had sleepovers on the beach?” Taako asked, quirking an eyebrow as he glided into the centre of the blanket pile and settled in. “That seems unwise.”

“Oh yeah, you had to be careful where you settled in for the night, or the tide could come in over you. And pretty much no matter what you did you’d wake up with sand in every possible opening. And sleeping bags didn’t help much because then there was the risk of crabs crawling in there with you while you slept.”

Magnus came back, and dumped his huge armful of blankets and pillows on the ground. “Let’s upgrade that ‘unwise’ to ‘just plain shitty’,” he said.

“Yeah, it was pretty shitty,” Merle admitted, coming back into the living room with the pot of dirt he put his arm while he slept. “But we _always_ had s’mores!”

“Alright, calm down, little man.” Taako raised his hands in surrender. “Of course we’re gonna have s’mores.” He pointed his wand towards the kitchen. The same balls of light that rearranged the furniture flew off, opened some cupboards, and returned with the necessary supplies while Taako summoned a harmless green flame in his palm.

It was Magnus who thought of making the fort first, standing up with a sheet in one hand halfway through his second s’more. Before he could even finish draping it over the couch the entire way, Taako was rushing back into his room. He came back with one of his immovable rods, which he stood up in the middle of their blanket pile as a tent pole. As the two of them built up a roof of draped sheets, Merle stayed beneath, removing his soulwood arm and setting it up on the coffee table that formed the other wall of the fort.

When they all gathered beneath, Merle conjured soft balls of light in a variety of colours, letting them float up to bounce against the roof like balloons. He kept one light cradled between the fingers on his good hand, lighting his face up from beneath. “Are you boys ready to get your pants scared off?”

“You ask from underneath a bunch of technicolour fairy lights,” Taako said. Magnus laughed.

“Also, none of us are wearing actual pants,” he pointed out, placing Steven’s glass bubble in the pot next to Merle’s soulwood arm. The arm shifted and gave him a thumb’s up, as though confirming Steven would be good there. 

Merle retorted and began with a ‘once upon a time’ behind him, but Magnus missed most of the beginning, caught up instead in the new flowers growing along the wooden arm. They looked almost like floral powder puffs, large, thin petals with ragged edges piled on top of one another, each flower a different shade of purple. They definitely hadn’t been there when he had asked Merle about the red ones earlier. Maybe he’d ask about the new ones in the morning.

* * *

“Can you fucking believe this.”

Merle started to snore gently in reply.

“It’s Merle,” Magnus whispered back. “Of course I can believe it.”

“Right when the kid was about to go into the crawlspace too,” Taako groused, but he laid back down and made no move to wake the sleeping storyteller. As he wrapped his approximate third of the blankets closely around himself, Magnus watched as Merle stretched his arms in his sleep, the stump of his right arm landing on Magnus’s left.

For a few moments, everything was still.

“Mag?” Taako’s voice came out of the darkness.

“Hm- yeah?” 

He tilted his head to look, and Taako had that same cautious, contemplative look on his face.

And for a moment, Taako considered what he had said a few hours earlier to Kravitz. _I’m worried no one else will have me_ , he had said. But then these two idiots had been awake when he got back to the apartment, and as he ate s’mores and listened to a surprisingly scary story, he had found himself thinking, _maybe I don’t need anyone else_.

But it seemed somehow unfair to say when Merle wasn’t awake to hear it too.

“All along, the real hugbear… was youuuuuuuu,” Taako whispered instead, letting his eyes fall closed.

Magnus laughed. Merle twitched in his sleep, but didn’t wake up. “Thanks, Taako,” he said. “...I guess?”

As Taako’s breath steadied in sleep on his right and Merle continued to snore on his left, Magnus was the last one left awake again. Lying on his back amidst all the pillows and blankets, he stared up at a roof made of bedsheets, lit by glowing balloons that were beginning to fade as their caster fell deeper into sleep.

Whatever the statue in Refuge meant, it wasn’t him. Not anymore. Not yet. He was Magnus Burnsides of the incredibly stupidly named Tres Horny Boys, and he wasn’t going to let anything change that, not even the static in his head.

 _I can’t fight what isn’t there, Jules,_ he thought to himself, touching the ring he wore on his left hand. _There’s a piece missing, and I should’ve gotten it back when I drank from the Voidfish’s tank-_

The Voidfish.

It had raised a tendril to his hand against the glass all those months ago, and Johann had said it had never done anything like that before, not in the entire time he had been its caretaker. Just for him. And then it had _sang_ to them. Had it been trying to tell him something?

Maybe it wasn’t much, but it was all he had.

“I’ll fix this,” he whispered into the silence. He felt Taako squirm slightly amidst his cocoon of blankets, and caught a glimpse of Merle’s remaining fingers twitch, moonlight glinting off his bracer. “I’ll figure this out.

“I promise.”

* * *

As night gave way to morning, as restless anxiety finally gave way to sleep, a third flower curled around the soulwood arm’s knuckles, proudly taking its place: a yellow rose. 

**Author's Note:**

> basically my headcanon at the time was that soulwood will occasionally bloom flowers symbolic of people that the "host" is close to, in moments they feel particularly close to that person. I didn't write down what website I got these descriptions for in my notes, but I'm sure if you plug the quotes into google you'll find them.
> 
>   * Magnus's flowers are nasturtium: "victory in battle and conquest". Red nasturtium in particular is "courage, strength or passion".
>   * Taako's flowers are purple carnations: "This flower may also be the perfect present for someone you find witty - its capriciousness or unpredictability in the positive light."
>   * Yellow roses symbolize friendship. I originally wanted to go with Irises as they apparently symbolize "your friendship is everlasting and it means a lot to you. Being a potent symbol of friendship, this flower also symbolizes valor, hope and compliments" but I already had purple in there with the carnations so I thought yellow would pop. Also I'm pretty sure rose colour symbolism is generally better known.
> 

> 
> Also I realized at some point posting this that Magnus had hugged Taako before in The Crystal Kingdom arc, and that he probably should've mentioned that along with Hurley and Ren's hugs but I forgot when I was writing it. whooops


End file.
